Samsung Announces Galaxy Note Smartphone (the Stylus is Back!)

And you thought the stylus went extinct along with Windows Mobile of yesteryear? Think again! Companies like HTC, and now Samsung, are bringing back the stylus, this time on capacitive screens. Today Samsung announced the Galaxy Note, a impressively powerful smartphone with a massive 5.3″ Super AMOLED (but not S-AMOLED Plus, oddly) display that rocks *slightly beyond* HD resolution, at 1280×800, making for a pixel density of 285. Inside it has the dual-core Exynos that we’ve come to love, but clocked at a faster-than-Galaxy-S-II 1.4GHz per core. The Galaxy Note will come with Gingerbread, and will be HSPA+ capable. In terms of size and weight, Samsung has managed to keep the Galaxy Note quite lean: it’s less than 10mm thick, and weighs 6.3 ounces. As a point of comparison, the Dell Streak, another smartphone/tablet hybrid (but with a 5″ display and lower resolution screen), is 7.7 ounces, and around the same thickness. There’s also plenty of battery power to drive the big display with a 2500mAh battery.

The stylus is actually included within the device, compared to, say, the HTC Flyer, which has no stylus silo built in. It looks like Samsung has done some impressive integration with the stylus, as you can see in the below video.

The question remains whether the Galaxy Note is too big to be a phone. In any case, you’ll have time to think about it: no availability has been announced.

Brandon is a graduate from the Villanova School of Business, located near Philadelphia, PA. He's been a technology writer since 2002, and, in 2005, became Editor-in-Chief of Pocketnow, a then Windows Mobile-focused website. He has since helped to transition Pocketnow into a top-tier smartphone and tablet publication. He's so obsessed with technology that he once entered a candle store and asked if they had a "new electronics" scent. They didn't.